A Hamilton Yule redemption — slandered cake recovers its good name

I fell off my donkey, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Saw the light? No. Took the bite. Just one sufficed. Converted me away from my skeptical little assumptions about a most controversial and divisive holiday tradition.

I'm talking about Christmas cake, of course - some call it fruitcake, but it's Christmas cake, because it really only becomes unavoidable at this time of year.

I'm glad I didn't avoid Dayna Firth and her aunt, Pat Russell, when they invited me to sit down the other day and try thinking inside" the box. The Christmas cake box, made of pine, put together with planks butt jointed together into a rectangle and lined with brown buttered paper. Husband Bill Russell built it for Pat back in the 1950s.

Dayna has one too, built by her later father, Douglas, when he married her late mother, Margaret, also in the 1950s.

It is a long family tradition and was featured in a full-page spread, written by then food writer Trent Rowe, in The Hamilton Spectator in 1983 (Nov. 12).

I once wrote on these pages that there must be a memory retardant in among Christmas cake ingredients because the confection induces amnesia from one year to the next about how truly awful it is; else-wise people would have stopped making and eating it back when good King Wenceslaus was just prince regent.

In the spirit of true conversion, I confessed my sin - that I had ever said or even thought such a thing about Christmas cake - to Pat and Dayna. They were very forgiving. They hear it all the time.

Christmas cake has been demonized," says Dayna. It doesn't deserve it."

In our day," says Pat, 91, everyone made it." It was also used as wedding cake at weddings, and a piece or more always got saved for the children's baptisms. Christmas cake could be kept for months and months, sometimes wrapped preservatively in cheesecloth soaked in brandy or rum.

I remember my parents coming home from a wedding, each with a piece, and if you were single, you were supposed to put the piece under your pillow and you would dream of your groom (to be)," says Pat.

I think I saw Bill smile.

The binding agents that held the cake together allowed the cake to help bind the community together. Everyone shared everyone else's Christmas cake back then.

We revisit the Townson/Russell/Firth Christmas cake tradition now because Dayna took over the Christmas cake-making tradition for her part of the family when her beloved mother Margaret Firth, much mourned by so many in this community, died in 2020.

Pat, of course, has been making it since her youth. She and Margaret inherited the tradition from their mother Sarah Townson, who came to Hamilton from Ireland around 1920. Sarah Townson, pictured in that Trent Rowe article, used to make hundreds of pounds of Christmas cake, using her special recipe, the one Pat and Dayna use to this day, and sell them, both at Christmas and for weddings. They went quickly.

When I arrive at Pat's house, somewhat anxious (I had not been on the best of terms with the squarish loafy footballs of dried fruit rind, walnuts, raisins and cake meal that I knew from my past), she shows me to a table. Spread out there is the well-preserved copy of the 1983 Spectator article.

It was very positive. Could I, in all conscience, be the same?

The men would make the (wooden) boxes," Dayna explains. The fruit would ripen and the flavours would intensify (as the cake sat in the wood box after it came out of the oven where it baked for four hours)."

The box would become so saturated in the butter that, over the years, the wood got too smooth to hold the nails in and they fell out, says Dayna, handing down a story from her grandmother (Sarah Townson).

Dayna passes the wooden box to me to inhale its fragrance. It's like an oak barrel that they age whisky or wine in. Such a rich aroma.

Twelve seems to be a kind of magic number associated with the cake and its traditions.

The cake weighs 12 pounds," says Dayna. A pound of that is butter, give or take a few ounces. When her mother and Pat were growing up in Hamilton there was a tradition that you had to collect 12 pieces of different Christmas cake from friends, relatives and such by Jan. 1.

You had a week to do it, between Christmas and New Year's," says Pat. You could always count on knowing 12 people you could get a piece from. One year I only got 11 pieces but at the last minute a friend came by with a piece." Phew.

Not everyone made their Christmas cake the same way so there was a lot of variety, and many people, says Pat and Dayna, used the tin boxes that I'm more familiar with as containers for Christmas cake rather than wood boxes.

Some put thick marzipan toppings on and half an inch of icing, especially for the cakes used at weddings.

For Dayna, the cake is a beautiful connection with her past, her roots, her heritage. For Pat, well, it seems like old times that have just infused themselves into new times.

For me, it's a test of intestinal fortitude, so to speak. They bring out the cake. They serve me a piece. I'm scared. What if I don't like it? What if it hurts?

It melts on my tongue. It breaks itself open on my palette in these joyous sequences of sympathetic flavours - the almond, the apricot, the pineapple and currants, the texture and smooth moistness. This is not the stuff of office parties. Bill brings me a brandy to chase it down with. Christmas, come early, flushes my senses with a kind of Dickensian merriment, with mirth and mouthfuls of sumptuous joy.

Did I say St. Paul? It was a conversion worthy of Scrooge. What's today, my fine fellow?" Today?" replied the boy. Why, it's Christmas Day!" Oh, good, I haven't missed it.

Merry Christmas and piece on earth to all, and, to all, a good bite!

Sarah Townson, Margaret Firth, you are alive and honoured in your children's culinary Christmas care.

The recipe, no secret, is as follows:

Townson Christmas Cake Makes one 12-pound cake

1 lb. golden raisins

1 lb. sultana raisins

1 lb. whole green glace cherries

1 lb. whole red glace cherries

1/2 lb. coconut

1/2 lb. walnut pieces

1/2 lb. whole blanched almonds

1/2 lb. peel

1/2 lb. dried pineapple pieces, chopped or cut

1/2 lb. dried apricots, chopped or cut

4 c. flour

14 oz. tin crushed pineapple

1 lb. butter

3 1/2 c. icing sugar

1 dozen large eggs

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Line sides and bottom of the bottomless wooden box with several thicknesses of buttered brown paper (brown paper shopping bags work well when cut to fit). Sit box on a cookie sheet, atop a piece of corrugated cardboard cut to fit the sheet.

To make cake, combine dried fruits and nuts in a large bowl and coat well with flour. In a separate large bowl, cream butter with icing sugar. Blend in eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add crushed pineapple. Combine with dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Transfer contents to the buttered, paper-lined box. Bake for 1 hour at 300 degrees. After 1 hour, reduce heat to 275 degrees and bake for an additional 3 to 3 1/4 hours, for a total baking time of 4 to 4 1/4 hours, until the top is golden brown.

Cool completely. Remove box and base, and cut cake into desired-sized pieces. Wrap each piece well in plastic wrap and refrigerate. Cake will 'ripen' and flavours will intensify. To serve, slice into pieces.

Optional: plump raisins in brandy beforehand, or pour a bit of brandy over top of cake when cake is warm from the oven.

Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jmahoney@thespec.com